omg, if i would have found your thread only a few monthes fewer.
What you want to know is the following:
First of all: You don't have a proper HW RAID card. The card you have is for money saving purposes a so called "fake RAID" or "BIOS RAID" implementation. Which means, that for the OS it will look like if you have one drive, but the fake RAID BIOS together with the driver provide some functionality to make that work. It's no HW RAID. And it's no software RAID (which means the OS implementation) it's none of tehm. It's something in between.
There are possibilitys to do it on Linux but it's rather hard. Altough all current distros bring support for the SATA chipset itselfe, they don't know how to deal with that BIOS implementations resp. the way the BIOS and driver map the RAID to the MBR and so on, so Linux can see the HD's but can't recognize the RAID. This is about the way the SiI BIOS writes the partition table to the MBR(s) of the disk(s) ... which is by the way called Medeley at SiI products ... that's form my understanding the point.
As you found out yourselfe the driver support for Linux by SiI is very poor. But it's possible to realize it.
The one way is to use open source drivers: The open source drivers for the newer Linux kernels (2.6) is based on libata, device mapper (dm) and dmraid. At least There are!! --> Because of the unwillingness of HW manucafturers to cooperate with Linux developers it's often hard to program drivers. (==> backward engeneering is needed) So that's the good news. The bad news is, that I haven't seen any distribution which provides an installer to do use that stuff at all and of course not to the convinience for the user. Only if you use certain distros the HW manufacturer supplies drivers and the installation works simmilar to the way on Win (driver disk ...) . See the link below.
Fortunately SiliconImage now supports some newer Distros then only grandpas like RH8+9. (see link below) But if you use these you'll never be able to update the kernel or recompile it or somehing (like for security issues or special needs in conjunction with the proprietary ATI display drivers) 'cause the modules are ONLY for this one kernel they are built for.
There is only one linux distro which enables you with a special CD to install Linux on such a fake RAID together with windows and that's gentoo. it's possible but it's horrible to install. only for geeks and freaks. (gentoo at all and gentoo with SATA fake RAID in special)
In gerneral if you want to learn more about the topic you have to be prepared to search for hours and days in the net, and read your eyes bleedy. apart from that if you insist on installing Linux on the fake RAID you have to invest hours and days either for gentoo, or for the method some other guy mentioned above in the thread (installing on another HD, then switching over to the fake RAID) if you want to do so plse note the following links.
In my expirence the easiest way is to install one OS on a HD apart from the other. I have now my 2 SATA fake RAID drives + one extra PATA drive. on the PATA drive (hda) there is a /boot partition for linux (64MB) a 40GB partition for windows and the rest is a data partition for mp3s, the 2 SATA HD's (sda + sdb) are now used with Linux software RAID directly, as it gives me the possibility to make RAID 0 for "/" and RAID1 for a data partition. So i don't use the fucking Medeley at all in the end. After a odyssey of allmost 3 years!
creating software RAID on install
http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-3136.html
Linux drivers from SiI
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/...ctid=2&osid=1&
BIOS RAID support on Linux 2.6.x (gen2)
http://tienstra4.flatnet.tudelft.nl/~gerte/gen2dmraid/
Info On SATA and The Linux Kernel
http://4elements.4mg.com/Main/sata.html
The Linux Documentation Project HOWTO Index Page
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
(search the page for "raid")
FC4 Install Problem - SATA RAID 0
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/topic-49175-18.html
Serial ATA (SATA) chipsets — Linux support status (outdated)
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html#sil
